New publication coming soon to the Journal of Educational Psychology! 🥳
Both phonological short-term memory (STM) and the executive component of working memory (WM) play a unique and significant developmental role in emergent bilingual children’s mathematical word problem-solving. The two components are not only structurally different, but they also contribute to different types of growth in mathematical problem-solving. In addition, the verbal components of WM (phonological STM and executive WM) can contribute jointly (i.e., interact) in predictions of mathematical problem-solving growth within the second language system.
The study also found there are significant benefits of L1 processing (Spanish in this case) in WM that contribute to the rate of growth in L2 (English in this case) WM and L2 mathematical word problem-solving. These findings have implications for bilingual instruction aimed at bolstering L1 WM in terms of its influence on mathematical word problem-solving in the child’s L2.